JUST A WEEK after Christ’s resurrection, now denigratingly known as Easter Sunday, have we gone into newer mindsets that can usher us into new ways of living through our mortal years? The passion, agony and eventual may have been a defining moment in time, but through the millennial years, has Mankind learned the lessons for the good, righteous life?
As have been imparted through centuries of Christendom, the lessons are crystal clear enough. First, the Christ was teacher, redeemer and savior of man’s sinfulness, of his vile thoughts towards each other, of leading a life so venal and virulent, two world wars have taken place, preceded by pockets of affliction more racial than simply man-influenced.
To reiterate: resurrection signifies rebirth which in turn directs us to a revitalization, after of course rejecting the ways of sin. So simply stated that has been, but so blithely ignored, even rejected, because sinning always lends itself easy in acquiring the material possessions in life. Always the road less taken — thorny, torturous even — is the road untaken, more towards perdition than to progress.
Across time, the Christian way, however resonating in greater clarity and needful relevance, is shunned, discarded, given a heedless attention, undaunted by a simple call. Man — you and I and the rest of us — is inherently good; others make him less so. Man is capable of greatness; those around him make him less so.
To reiterate in the context of our own situation, right here and now, where we grapple with day-to-day issues of getting by, we are ourselves confronted by the same storyline of rebirth, resurrection, and redemption.
True, today’s circumstances are decidedly lesser in significance to what the Calvary and the Cross have been imprinted in us — how can the Death that mid-afternoon of a sweltering day ever be any notches in parity with the cross we carry ourselves?
Concededly, Baguio can never be in equal measure 2,000 years back to Jerusalem, despite the afflicting crosses on our back. Yet, the imperatives, the circumstances remain essentially in the same mold, the same worth, and the same import.
Rebirth comes from having gone through the pitfalls of devastation, and wasn’t Baguio wrought in that mold in 1990, by the force of a language shaking mortals down on the knees, as if in genuflection?
Resurrection comes from rising anew on one’s feet and gloriously standing in equal measure, this time surer than ever, bolder than before, determined than the last gasp of breath. And weren’t we given that lifetime of a choice, precisely to make us conscious to be better once risen, to be right at the crossroad of a choice, to be steadfastly up and about even as we wrestle with the very issue of survival, redemption, rebirth?
Let’s face it. In 1990, in the aftermath of a killer quake that left many of us shaken, we did rise, we did recover, we did emerge from it all well-defined in the ways forward. Concededly, Baguio’s journey in past three decades has been anything but rewarding — except for those whose rewards were greater than common.
Let’s admit it: in that journey, governance has been anything but ill-done, mostly about being served, than serving, much of which spent in gay abandonment — of being right, of being righteous even, rather than simply wallowing in human goodness benefitting a privileged few to the detriment, nay rejection, of the great many.
Redemption can only happen not just as a mere happenstance. It takes place when more than just a few good men and women are consecrated to make the city get past the many crosses we have been bearing up in sufferance for all three decades. The litany of woes simply lengthens — a degraded environment, service that takes time to get rooted in, congestion in many places that deters growth and renewal, and a work force of public servants endeavoring for what serves the greatest good for the greater many.
For that much urban woes to be worthy for rebirth, resurrection and redemption, it will take the full emphatic force of the very deprived many to be in covenant with the governing and governed, for governance to come our way — with passion, zeal, and a single-minded focus that the early Christians of yore had in great measure.
Less than that will result in the fullness of worth for the kind of rebirth that Baguio deserves, rightly so, after years and years of neglect, insensitivity, and plain chicanery. Less than three weeks into our own Judgment Day is the time to cast ourselves well into the future of shared peace, prosperity and pride.
About time, isn’t it?
